To make a self-portrait is to posit some
part of the persona as an identity. It is an assertion of the self, reflecting
interests, aspirations, and desires. This exhibition focuses on work in
which the artist's life provides a primary source. Much of it blends daily
life, memory, invention, and a perception of some aspect of the persona.
In some of the work the artist is literally depicted, in others she is
represented symbolically or metaphorically. Some of the artists work as
diarists, others not. The topics are diverse, ranging from universal rites
of passagechildhood, coming of age, romance, maternity, motherhoodto
those issues often associated with Latin American arta concern with
social and political content and an interest in surrealism and fantasy.
For some of the artists it is the intersection of life with historical
events that provides the defining moment.

The notion of identity shaped by association
with the mythic abounds and the attributes of the gods provide further
insights into the persona. Works include references to Wonder Woman, the
Egyptian goddess Mut; the orishas, Shango, Yamaya, Obbataca, and Oshosi;
the Hindu goddess Kali; the Aztec goddesses Tonatzin and Coatlicue; and
the Christian Virgin of Guadalupe and the Virgin Mary. Others in the exhibition
work in an attempt to counter the mythic presence of Frieda Kahlo whose
work has come to define contemporary Latin American self-portraiture.

Transcultural dislocation is a theme
in much of the workmost of the artists have lived in more than one
country and culture. The notion of a "hybrid identity," in which
cultures merge, provides a subtext in many of the artists' work. There
is common agreement that home is not a fixed locale but carried within.

Monika Bravo's poetic images of a dramatic
storm moving through New York harbor, of boat traffic traversing the rivers,
and of rain on her studio windows, are some of the last footage to capture
the views from the World Trade Center. Bravo was a participant in the
World Views program sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Seven hours of video, condensed to five minutes and forty seconds in time
lapse, record the extraordinary evening before the towers were attacked.
Panoramic vistas and streaks of lightning are set to music and capture
the beauty of the city at night. Shot from the 92nd floor of the north
tower, September 10, 2001 Uno Nunca Muere la Vispera is dedicated
to the memory of Michael Richards, a fellow artist who spent the night
in his studio and did not escape the next morning.

The New York City skyline, harbor and
bridges feature prominently in other works by Bravo. This footage was
intended to be a part of an installation entitled A_Maze. The 2001
Uno Nunca Muere la Vispera refers to a saying in her native Colombia
which means you die on the day you are intended to die. This work was
produced, in part, with a grant from the New York State Council on the
Arts to Lehman College Art Gallery.

Historic events also provide the content
in four mixed media photographs from the Terremoto / Earthquake
series by Patricia Villalobos Echeverría. This series grows out
of her experience of the massive 1972 earthquake in Managua, Nicaragua.
Ten thousand people were killed in this city which lies on the San Andreas
Fault. The body is central to her work and it provides a locus from which
to examine the political, social, historical and mythological content.
The four prints are richly layered in meaning and offer multiple interpretations.
They reference both the seismic events as well as their political consequences.
In this series Villalobos is identified with Coatlicue, a form of the
Aztec mother goddess Tonatzin whose identity is also merged with the Virgin
of Guadalupe. Their composite identities are a metaphor for her ownborn
in Tennessee to Salvadorian parents, Villalobos, grew up in Nicaragua
and the United States.

In the photographs Villalobos lays across
a field of stars which suggests the night sky as well as the American
flag. Superimposed on the photographic image are serigraphs of seismologist's
graphs of the quakes, which also function as targets. Her body is bound
with wire and her open eyes appear lifeless. The gelatin silver prints
are streaked with washesprinter's ink diluted with solventswhich
provide a painterly surface and a sense of eroded earth.

Argentinean Matilde Marín's large-scale
photographic installation is composed of 31 shadow portraits. Trained
as a sculptor, Marín has worked for many years as a printmaker.
More recently she has incorporated photography, video, and digital imagery
into her work. In a sense the collage of photographs in this exhibition,
Itinerary, is a travelogue, recording the light and textures. Created
over a period of years, Marín has photographed her cast image in
many countries. Shadow lengths suggest the hour of day and, in the broader
sense, the passage of time. This formalist composition is Marín's
ephemeral mark on the landscape.

Installation view

María Magdalena Campos-Pons has
worked in many media and continues to explore performance-based photography
as a means of examining identity. Campos-Pons emigrated from Cuba in 1988
and much of her work over the past fifteen years has dealt with memory
of another time and place. She has frequently referenced the spirituality
of Santeria, a syncretic practice with roots in Catholicism and Yoruba
religions, in the objects and colors she uses. Her body too functions
as a signifier. In the Nesting series cultural dislocation continues
as an element but this time the objects also include wooden representations
of North American birds, a gift from her mother-in-law. Birds are traditionally
a symbol of freedom. These birds are also migratory and live in multiple
environments, as Campos-Pons does. Perhaps, as the title of the series
implies, it is a settling in.

Campos-Pons works with a large format
Polaroid camera, which produces singular and instantaneous results. She
stands before the camera as if in a trance. Her pose is both frontal and
formal. In Nesting I she is the nest. Her hair, looped into fine
braids mixed with beads, surrounds and camouflages her head. Yellow facial
paint along with the intricate coiffeur reference African traditions.
Birds flank her sides and top her head in the photograph. In Nesting
II she poses in imitation of the owls that are part of this composition.
Her eye coloring suggests African body paint as well as the markings of
the owl. In the Nesting series the amber color of the background
and the beads are a reference to Ochosi, the hunter orisha. In a poem
she wrote about nesting, Campos-Pons enumerates those things, which characterize
a nest. It is both a utopia and an entrapment.

Kukuli Velarde's video installation
The Apple of His Eye, is a very personal examination of parental
expectations and their consequences. It focuses on adolescence and the
painful process of separation and the transition to adulthood. Velarde,
raised in Peru, was a gifted child artist and the daughter of a man who
once aspired to be a painter. The tale is a classic one of a father who
chose a career for a childpublishing books of her work as a teenagerand
a child who took flight from her family, from painting and from Peru.
The video is structured as a father/daughter dialogue with Velarde's father
speaking on camera and the artist responding in text replies. Both are
speaking with the perspective of time and distance. The video is surrounded
by line drawings done directly on the walls. Large-eyed princesses, monsters,
flocks of vicuna, mermaids, puppies, and adolescent girls frolic on an
8 foot by 24 foot surface and recreate her earlier style.

In Eugenia Vargas' photographic series
My Horse and I, toy store surrogates, evolved from her earlier
performance-based self-portraits, enact a sequence which reads like fiction.
Vargas grew up in southern Chile and like many children developed an important,
early relationship with her horse. Its presence in her work is both literal
and metaphorical. In this series childhood experiences are transformed
through memory and the imagination. Intense color saturation of the reds
and greens in these prints creates an eerie dream-like sense of narrative.
While it suggests both the idyllic play of childhood and a sense of nostalgia,
it also hints at a darker interpretation. My Horse and I offers
a visual narrative in which one cannot help but see images of power and
control, metaphors for sexuality, and a sense of loss.

In
the work of Mexican-born Tatiana Parcero, her body is the primary subject.
Ignoring the whole, Parcero isolates partsher eyes, her hand, and
her stomach in the three works in this exhibition. Using transparency overlays
she adds additional imagery and meaning. In Nuevo
Mundo #10, an early map of the New World is an obvious metaphor for
new life. The map is superimposed on a dramatic profile of her pregnant
bellyits landmasses, harbors and newly charted seas seem to radiate
out from her navel. In Palmas #31, a photograph of her hands are
paired with a Meso American codex. If fortunes are to be told by reading
the hands, Mexican history and the legacy of the Spanish conquest mark Parcero's
lifeline and predictions of the future will be predicated on the past.

The photography of Marta María
Pérez Bravo hovers between the documentation of performance and
the symbolic representation of the syncretic beliefs of Afro-Cuban religions,
particularly Santeria and Palo Monte. In the three photographs in the
exhibition the forms are minimal. Between her legs are objects, attributes
of the orishas and their offerings. The images float on a light ground
conveying a sense of mystery.

In an untitled large-scale print by
Mari Mater O'Neill two comic style heroines do battle with some undefined
force of evil. Frame by frame they wield shovels and hoes. A trowel dangles
from the belt of one of the figures. Flowers and hearts adorn the background.
The final sequence culminates with the two in a romantic kiss. Prominently
displayed in the center panel is the stamp of the Instituto de Cultura
Puertorriqueña, the chief arts agency on the island, lending its
imprimatur. The style of this work marks a change in the more lyrical
style of O'Neill's earlier work.

Anaida Hernández deals with the
external self, the visage. Her installation Multiplo is interactive.
Fifty small mirrors, attached by magnets, cover a galvanized steel wall.
Initially reflecting the artist's image, it now includes the viewer as
a composite portrait made up of many small facets. The mirrors are intended
to be used by the viewer, taken from the wall and examined. Each mirror
handle has a simple symbol stenciled on the back, such as a heart or dice,
possibly suggesting an attribute or an arbitrary fortune or fate. Watching
the interaction for just a few minutes, one becomes aware that this work
is about appearance and maybe even vanity. The audience tries not to be
seduced by their own image but usually fails. Hernández's earlier
installations have focused on social issues such as domestic violence,
immigration, and human rights. This work seems related to her more recent
installations which deal with the notion of games"games of
chance" as a metaphor for the arbitrary nature of fate and the "games
people play" as a reference to interpersonal relationships. Anaida
Hernández moved to New York from Puerto Rico in the mid-1990s and
has recently settled in the Bronx.

Marina Gutiérrez's two works
in this exhibition are richly layered in meaning with references that
range from the art historical and literary to the personal. Her sculptural
installation Dis-illusionment Gown - Body Mask series alludes to
the loss of love. The figure hangs from a coathanger, like a garment on
the rack, and might possibly read in an earlier era as an allusion to
abortion. Its war-tattered face is covered with writingPablo Neruda's
poem of love lost "los versos mas triste." The bodice of her
dress is clad in armor and she wears a Purple Heart with a labyrinth within.
The neckline is embossed with the phases of the moon. A cage-like skirt
is adorned with small mesh boxes that compartmentalize objects representing
aspects of an idealized domestic lifedoll furniture, fingernails
with red polish, penises, and babies.

Two mythic females, whose domain is
the sky, are found in the imagery of a second work by Gutiérrez.
Mut, consort of Amon, arches across the two panels of a large-scale print
and a smaller figure of Wonder Woman stands at the bottom. The surface
of the larger figure, with milagros attached, provides a ground for images
of fertility and childhoodbabies, a couple, a hopscotch court. The
figures are surrounded by the parts of a bifurcated identityon one
side with the tropical scenes of Puerto Rico and on the other with the
urban views of New York City.

Josely Carvalho's book
of roofs//#0001.tracajá.40 is a part of an ongoing project,
a visual diary that ranges from an interactive Website to mixed-media
installations. The series, inspired by the clay roof tiles that have been
used for centuries in Brazil, began in the late 1990s. The series title
provides a broad metaphor for shelter, both for the body and the soul.
The early production of the tiles, said to be shaped by draping clay across
the leg of a worker, infers a connection of labor, production, and the
body.

The prints in this
series of forty works combine traditional woodcut with digital images.
Delicate strata of hand-made paper joined with Roplex, create a translucent,
multi-layered image. In book of roofs//#0001.tracajá.40
the Hindu goddess Kali, creator and destroyer, slayer of time and death,
is overlaid with an image of the bone structure of a sea turtle. The latter
functions as a metaphor for the self and a personal icon for Carvalho.
It appears throughout Carvalho's work. The sea turtle is an animal that
travels great distances and navigates both sea and land. Its home is always
with it. In a sense it is a metaphor for living and working in two cultures,
Brazil and New York, as Carvalho does.

Colombian-born Esperanza
Cortés links the flourishing of her own artistic career with the
birth of her daughter in an autobiographical, mixed-media work. The work
includes a pregnant nude in low relief that floats on a blue/green encaustic
ground, perhaps a reminder of the primordial sea from which we all evolved.
Veins radiate out from her pubis, running down the figure to root her
to the earth and upward to become the branches of a "tree of life"
in full foliage. Beneath the figure is a vessel, like those intended to
hold holy water, conferring a blessing and offering purification. Decorative
tin leaves and glass beads embellish this altar-like composition. Defined
in symbols of blood and water, this earth mother image is depicted as
a powerful force of nature.

In Reflections
Lydia M. Negrón is represented as a serene, contemplative figure
surrounded by objects. Each is embedded with allusions to the multiple
cultures in which she lives, connecting to her Puerto Rican heritage and
to her life in the United States. Catholic traditions, a bible, rosary
beads, and a painting of the Virgin Mary, are in one corner. A mirror
with Taíno iconography is in another. Designs on the frame of another
mirror reference African art. There is a chandelier with an American eagle.
Negrón exists somewhere in the middlein a room filled with
sources of light and mirrored reflections, Negrón's environment
is an autobiographical reference.

Elba Damast's This
is the way I feel presents a multi-headed self-portrait that displays
a distinctly irreverent personality. She clowns with bared teeth, dangles
a cigarette from her mouth, and sticks her tongue out. Each head is a
heart, the seat of one's emotional life and an icon Damast has used throughout
her more recent work. The patterned floral background is an extension
of her interest in eastern philosophy and Indian miniature paintings.
Surrounded by a small fence, the figure is corralled, suggesting restraints
and limits. It is hard not to see this dominant central figure with its
millefleur pattern in the background without thinking of the well-known
medieval tapestry Unicorn in Captivity. In a second work, a Janus-headed
bust, her head is again a heart. She looks in two directions. A large
bronze heart, engraved with words of love, is exposed on her chest.

Although trained as
an architect, Belkis Ramírez works as a printmaker, using the print
and, sometimes, the block from which it is printed as a medium for large-scale
installations as well as smaller works. Her figurative work deals with
a range of issues, from the marginalization of women and freedom of speech
to the ecological problems in Latin American countries. Se ha secado
mi jardín/my garden has dried up shows the artist's self-portrait
carved from a plank of mahogany, like a wood-cut block. Surrounded with
barbed wire, she is both protected from the outside world by this barrier
and caged in by it. The title refers to plants that died when a friend
failed to water them for her.

Beatriz Mejia-Krumbein
uses a quilt made in her native Colombia as the ground for her self-portrait.
The quilt is accompanied by a statement that the artist asked be posted
with the work"My artist inside can be ignored but nobody has
the power to make it mute to myself." Mejia-Krumbein paints herself
onto the reverse side of the quilt without concealing its raw seams and
stitching. In this work she is surrounded by smaller ghostly portraits,
with wide open eyes. Her mouth sewn closed and her arms tied or encircled
with shackles. Through the work Mejia-Krumbein also addresses larger issues
of political repression and fear in a violent society, of bearing witness
yet being voiceless. She thinks of the quilt as a symbol of fragmentation
as well as a symbol of unity. With its individual pieces stitched together
and bonded, it provides shelter and comfort.

Photographer Sandra
Bermudez uses eroticism and desire throughout her work as the means to
an end. In two works in this exhibition I Miss You and I Need
You, she creates playful, seductive works that seem to reference pornography
as much as contemporary body art. Large-scale tondos offer close-ups of
Bermudez's lips, teeth and tongue as she mouths words of love. In these
works, which are part of a larger series, Bermudez's mouth is painted
with bright red lipstick. The intense color is reinforced by the rich
saturated C-print tones. Her native country of Colombia is known for its
exportation of red roses and professional beauty pageants, which market
women and romance for international consumption. These photographs parody
the glossy images of Penthouse and Playboy.

Dominican-born, New York artist Scherezade
García is represented by two works, details from the ParadiseSeries,Sleep my little child I and Sleep my little child
II. Sea and sky surround cherubic infants on bright pink, baby crib
mattresses. Painted on the underside of a plastic covering, these babies
with halos and plump cheeks are accompanied by the earliest desires of
worldly goodstoys and candy. These images juxtapose the sacred and
the profanethe pure spiritual being of a sleeping child and the
potential for corruption by the culture.

Mexican artist Mónica Castillo
works against the tradition of female self-portraiture in her country
that has been largely defined by the cult of Frida Kahlo with its intimate
details of pain and despair. Castillo has concentrated on the making and
re-making of her own image since 1993, always using her face in such a
way that the works cannot be taken for personal revelations. She is represented
in this exhibition with a fiberglass cast of her face and upper torso.
Painted chocolate brown with oil and acrylic, the surface is covered with
street debriscigarette butts, pop tops, orange peels, discarded
paper, and crumpled leaves. This artist wants us to look at her self-portraits
and see that they are not about her at all.

Laura Anderson Barbata uses familiar
objects to examine inequities, in the installation Legal but Illegitimate.
Alluding to racial and economic disparities and to wishes and dreams,
it is composed of two taxidermy pigeons on a simple table. The white bird
wearing a gilded wishbone is enclosed within a small rectangular structure
constructed of mirrors. The door is left ajar. The black pigeon is outside
the structure, alone with his meatless bone, peering inside. The two fail
to communicate and it is unclear which, if either, is free.

Annalee Davis uses her work to examine
cultural and historical issues of the Caribbean and her homeland of Barbados.
In her installation (up) rooted, a small house floats in the air
connected to the gallery floor with an expansive tangle of roots. The
house is small but broadly anchored to the earth. Davis's own roots in
the region go back for several hundred years. In this work she focuses
on recent migrations since the 50s, that have taken people away for employment,
education, and for opportunity. No one stays in one place permanently
and "home is a place carried within."